Refunds, privacy, and what happens to the recordings.

Refunds

Before you open the paid modules, a full refund, no reason needed. Write to info@thecommunitygarden.org.

Once you have opened them, we do not refund. The course is a download you keep, and Module 1 plus seven lessons are free precisely so you can decide before paying. At checkout you are asked to tick a box agreeing to immediate access and giving up the cancellation period — that tick is what makes this lawful, and if you do not tick it your statutory rights stand.

UK and EU buyers have a 14-day statutory cancellation right for digital purchases, which can only be waived by that explicit agreement at checkout. We are not trying to be clever about this: if you feel you were misled, write to us and we will sort it out.

What we collect

• If you buy the course: your email address, and a payment record held by Stripe, our payment processor. We never see your card number.
• If you use the course: your progress, stored in your own browser. It does not reach us.
• If you record for us: your voice, your name, and — only if you choose to send them — your photograph, a short biography, your community and your river.

We do not sell data, we do not run advertising trackers, and we do not share anything with third parties beyond Stripe and the hosting company that stores the files.

The recordings

This is the part that matters most, so it is the most specific.

• The speaker keeps a copy. Always, and their community too. The recordings are theirs; ours is a licence to use them, not ownership of them.
• Withdrawal. A speaker can ask us to remove their voice, name or photograph at any time, for any reason, without explaining. We will take it out of the live course within 14 days and confirm when it is done. Copies already downloaded by students cannot be recalled — by us or by anyone.
• Publication of a name or photograph is a separate decision from permission to record a voice. Either can be given without the other, and either can be withdrawn without the other.
• Archiving. Recordings will be deposited with a permanent language archive so they outlive this organisation. We are arranging this with the speakers rather than announcing it at them, and the archive will be named here and in the consent form before recording is complete.
• If this organisation ends, the recordings do not become an asset to be sold. They go to the archive and to the communities they came from.

Licensing

The dictionary and the vocabulary data are published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA 4.0) — use them, including commercially, provided you credit the source and share what you build on the same terms.

The recordings are not covered by that licence. They are individual people's voices and their terms belong to the speakers, set with them and recorded in the archive deposit.

The course lessons themselves — the writing, the design, the sequencing — remain ours, because selling them is what pays for the work.

How the language is written here

Shipibo-Konibo has more than one writing convention in use. We follow the practical orthography used in Peruvian intercultural bilingual education, and where our sources spell a word differently we keep the source spelling and note it in the dictionary entry rather than silently standardising.

Where our spelling and your teacher's disagree, your teacher is right. Tell us and we will change it.

Who we are

The Community Garden is a nonprofit. We operate as The Community Garden Foundation; our work, our projects and how to reach us are on the About page and at thecommunitygarden.org. If anything here is unclear or you think we have got something wrong, write to info@thecommunitygarden.org — a person reads it.